All in all, not the message he was hoping for, but still a good sign. Al-Britani was communicating directly with him, and appeared to be committed to conducting the attack in the name of the Khorasan group.

Rashid typed a short message back, telling him to maintain the operational security, and included the new password for them to use for all future messages.

He hit send, satisfied with the Jordan side of things, but he was still unsure about his own mission. The real mission, not the one his masters in Jabhat al-Nusra believed he was conducting.

The thought made him realize he hadn’t updated his leadership since he’d arrived, and they would want to know what was occurring. They might even go so far as to contact the Albanian cell that had been chosen to transfer the weapons, which would not be a good thing.

He pulled up another ProtonMail account in his saved contacts. One he’d used many, many times in the past two years. Before that, it was all Gmail. But even Gmail was better than Twitter direct messaging.

It had been an uphill climb convincing the leadership of just how enormously broad the collection capabilities of the crusaders were. He’d known it from his time spent with the DGSE—the French version of the CIA—but they had been convinced that nobody could find a needle in the haystack as large as Gmail. The vastness of the Internet was their protection, and it was just unfeasible that someone could track them in it. It took a spindly-armed, wispy-bearded man-child releasing a trove of secrets on the NSA before they believed.

They’d read the news reports the same day as Rashid, and he’d been brought in immediately, the leadership now asking him what they should do.

Initially, he’d given them Tor and PGP encryption, becoming the in-house expert on evading the crusader net. Later, he convinced them to switch to ProtonMail, which had been developed by kids at MIT and Switzerland specifically because of the man-child’s revelations, and he’d thanked that American ever since, absolutely convinced that there would have been many, many more believers martyred without his childish vision of right and wrong. He remembered the initial leadership meeting well, after the man-child had fled to Russia. As a joke, he’d told the emir they should offer him asylum for his contributions.

He heard the bell above the door to the café tinkle and glanced reflexively toward it, seeing nothing but two Albanian teenagers. He returned to his email, typing a short message detailing a false account of what they’d been doing and saying he was happy with the professionalism of the Albanians. He was debating creating a lie about meeting Omar when his phone vibrated on the table.

He picked it up, seeing a text message from his team. Omar had been seen walking into Tirana Park. He felt a little stab of adrenaline. So the meeting is going to occur on schedule. Good.

He looked at his watch, feeling an inescapable desire to leave. He saw he still had close to an hour, though. Time enough to complete the message to his command. He resumed typing.

*   *   *

Sitting inside the American Bar, Shoshana and I drank Cokes and watched some random soccer game on the one wide-screen TV, surrounded by a group of die-hard loyalists for whatever European team was playing.

I turned my head to the street outside the window, seeing a stream of people walking back and forth, the Internet café right below us and out of sight. We’d been on the trigger team for the surveillance for close to two hours, all timed with the soccer game to give us a reason to be here. Unfortunately for Shoshana, between the two of us, she was the only one that knew what Rashid looked like, so I got to watch soccer, and she had to stare at the street.

I’d staged the rest of the team, minus Jennifer and Aaron, at potential avenues of escape to pick up surveillance once the target had been acquired. So far, they’d just sat.

“Aaron is due in for rotation with Jennifer in ten minutes. You want to go get a bite to eat?”

She looked at me and said, “You want to eat with a murderer?”

“Damn it, Shoshana, would you stop that? You have to admit, you screwed things up in Jordan. No telling what we could have gotten from al-Britani. Maybe we wouldn’t even be doing this surveillance.”

Eyes on the street, she said, “Mission comes first. Always.”

I said, “It didn’t in Brazil. Your mission was over. You could have walked away.”

For the first time, I saw cracks in the ice princess. She said, “You could have too.”

She’d volunteered to sacrifice her life to save hundreds of thousands of people in Brazil, and I’d decided that wasn’t going to happen. We’d done something borderline stupid, but it had succeeded. Both of us working toward a greater good, regardless of our given mission. Which is why I knew, at her core, she wasn’t just an assassin, killing men she disliked. At least I hoped so, because right now she disliked me.

She smiled, playing me a little, saying, “Okay, Nephilim. I’ll go to lunch with you. I’ll give you some deep introspection into Jennifer. Is that what you want?”

I said, “No, no. We’re going to talk about you. Where you grew up, what you did as a child, that sort of thing. First-date stuff.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “Hmm . . . no games?”

“Nope.”

“And I can ask the same of you?”

I hesitated for a moment, and she said, “If it’s really a first date, I should be able to ask you whatever you ask me.”

I said, “I thought you could read that without asking. That’s what Aaron says.”

I saw hurt flit across her face and wondered what I’d done. I said, “Okay, yes. You can ask whatever you want. I don’t care.”

She leaned forward, her eyes bright and clear. “I want to talk about something other than death. I want to talk about living. Like what you talk to Jennifer about.”

Her gaze scored me like a laser, searching, and I felt pity. She was a creation of events beyond her control, manipulated by operations conducted before she even understood the cancer they would generate in her soul, and those actions had permanently twisted her. She had an ability few on Earth possessed, and her government had harnessed it, ignoring the toll it would take. And she was now trying to claw her way out of the abyss, to find a normalcy she’d seen between Jennifer and me.

I feared it was too late. After seeing what she’d done to al-Britani, I knew the abyss would swallow her, the undertow dragging her down no matter how hard she fought.

She leaned forward and took my hands, saying, “You were once like me. I feel it. How did you crawl out?”

The words caused me to recoil, pulling my hands away, afraid she could read my soul by touch. I’d felt it before with her, but it still scared the hell out of me.

She said, “What? Was it Jennifer? Is that it?” She reached out again and said, “I want to know. I want a life.”

I kept my hands in my lap, saying, “You should look at Aaron. He’s your Jennifer.”

She scoffed and said, “Aaron. All he cares about is the mission.” She saw the surprise on my face and said, “What?”

I said, “Really? You’re some type of psychic spoon-bender and you can’t read the man you’ve worked with forever? The guy’s crazy over you. Regardless of your sexual orientation.”

She looked back to the street, searching for our target. “He’s my boss. All he cares about is success. The mission.”

“I think you’re selling him short. Is that why you left Mossad when he asked?”

Still looking out the window, she said, “Don’t confuse trust with emotion. I trust him. He believed in me, and that was enough. I won’t work for anyone else, ever again.”

She returned to me and said, “You don’t know my history. What I’ve done. What I was forced to do. Aaron isn’t that way, but he’s still Mossad. He’d sacrifice me in a heartbeat if it meant mission success.”